Steps 1 and 2 are not required, you can just point it at a new folder and it does steps 1 and 2 for you. Your point on documentation is valid.

Step 1 might not be needed, but step 2 is, or at least rebasing/resetting master from upstream. Step 1 is less error prone/simpler than "clean up your working repo and fetch/update all branches." It's also not clear if changes in local wip/* branches will have any effect.

Step 2 should be handled by "pull-bot", e.g. SymbiFlow/vtr-verilog-to-routing#556 The yosys version of pull-bot merges automatically, but the one on SymbiFlow/vtr doesn't. Regardless, step 2 should be handled in a "public" fashion, rather than a local one.

You can operate update_tools.py on a fork, in which case step 2 should still be reflected on the remote, rather than just locally.

Step 1 (e.g. clean repo) is the behavior or update_tools.py in a clean directory. I'm wary of having update_tools.py doing the cleaning/rm -rf, but we could modify it to complain if the directory already has a git repo.